From the Pastor - Baptism and the Community of Faith

Last week I focused on the responsibility of the parents and godparents and offered a look at what the Church requires of them for baptism. This week I would like to push our discussion one step further and place the responsible parents and godparents into the context of the wider community of faith. Parents are indeed the first teachers of their children and therefore have the responsibility of maintaining the faith-life of their children until they can follow through on their own. Yet they are not alone in this task, for the godparents pledge to be their in offering their support and effort, as well as the Church into which the baptized are baptized. The first question I usually ask when I meet to speak about baptism to parents and godparents, is “ Why do you what your child baptized? What do you think baptism means?” Over the years I can honestly say that the responses have been as varied as the number of children represented, and while most are variations on a theme, there have been some surprising ones.

When we baptize a person, infant or adult, we believe that there are several things that take place. First and foremost on many a mind is the fact that the sacrament wipes away Original Sin, or the tendency that all people are born with to turn away from God and attempt to do all things on our own. Baptism reorients us toward the life that God has always offered to his creation, and invites us to have life without end in him. We become new creations in God and are invited to live every day moving ever closer to him. But not only do we cleanse the human soul and prepare a person for a life of holiness. We also bring the newly baptized into the very Body of Christ. Through a person's baptism, he or she are numbered among God's chosen. We are all made brothers and sisters both in and with Christ, and co-heirs to the Kingdom won by Christ ' s redemptive act. Such a privileged position requires us each to live both with and for one another. For the baptized community of believers, we are literally our brother's keepers and responsible to one another.

The life of faith is not an easy one, especially for those who struggle daily to achieve the level of perfection in holiness that God knows we can achieve. For us to make this happen we need to turn to others who are of like mind, and seek out the tools available and necessary to our continued growth. The Church, the family of believers into which we are baptized, necessarily provides that place where such growth is possible. We as a community have a responsibility to help parents and godparents, even the very persons baptized, in achieving the promises made to grow in faith. We have the responsibility to teach and admonish, encourage and support each of our members in the truth. I as a priest, Deacon Jesse as deacon, our faithful religious who are in our midst regularly, and you as parishioner share this work, since we each bring to the work of the Church our own unique gifts and experiences. Through the liturgy of prayer, at Mass or any other devotion offered, through the teaching of religious education classes, through the challenges offered in Christian charity to a fellow parishioner who is apparently struggling with the truth in his or her life, we can provide the environment in which even the weakest baptized person can flourish.

Too often the task of living our faith can be daunting and overwhelming, but only when we make the mistake that we are in this alone. It is not good enough for us to point a finger at someone else and say “ You need to be doing 'this'!” , where 'this' is anything from going to church regularly to avoiding sinful occasions in life. To do such a thing is to push off our own responsibility to not only encourage others to practice their faith more fully, but to help them to do it. To speak in terms of “ You...you...you” makes a person far less willing to return to the life of faith, and far more likely to become defensive. When we as a community take on our collective responsibility and speak to each other in terms of “ We...you and I...together” , then there is far less criticism and much more acceptance of the difficult task before us.

So, “What does baptism mean to you?” Why were you baptized? Was it only to wipe away sin? Or has it brought you into a family beyond your own? To support and be supported? To teach and to learn? To take and to give back? The Church of Christ wants all this to be true and more. And we need each other to make it happen.